David Samuel Kinderlehrer (October 23, 1941,Allentown, Pennsylvania)[1] is an American mathematician, who works on partial differential equations and related mathematics applied to materials in biology and physics.
Kinderlehrer received in 1963 his bachelor's degree fromMIT and in 1968 his Ph.D. from theUniversity of California, Berkeley underHans Lewy with thesisMinimal surfaces whose boundaries contain spikes.[2] He became in 1968 an instructor and in 1975 a full professor at theUniversity of Minnesota inMinneapolis. For the academic year 1971–1972 he was a visiting professor at theScuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. In 2003 he became a professor atCarnegie Mellon University.
He works onpartial differential equations,minimal surfaces, andvariational inequalities, with mathematical applications to the microstructure of biological materials, to solid state physics, and to materials science, including crystalline microstructure, liquid crystals, molecular mechanisms of intracellular transport, and models of ion transport.
In 2002, he was the editor of theHans Lewy Selecta published by Birkhäuser. His doctoral students includeIrene Fonseca.
In 2012, Kinderlehrer was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Mathematical Society.[3] In 1974 inVancouver he was an invited speaker (Elliptic Variational Inequalities) at theInternational Mathematical Congress.
